Drucker on Marketing: Lessons from the World's Most Influential Business Thinker

Chapter 14Marketing and Selling Are Not Complementary and May Be Adversarial

One evening in class, Drucker made a rather startling claim: “Everyone knows that marketing and selling are not identical,” he said. “But few understand that marketing and selling are not necessarily complementary and may even be adversarial.”

“Another astonishing Drucker pronouncement,” I thought. I had only recently completed a graduate course in marketing taught by another professor. He had carefully explained the idea that marketing and selling were not identical, something known by any business undergraduate today, but not necessarily in my era when many companies still lacked marketing departments and others dealing with the government avoided even awarding a sales ...